Great-Power Politics Is Ruining the Olympics

In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.

The testing that ensnared so many members of China’s swim team was conducted under the auspices of the national anti-doping agency, known as CHINADA. Each country in international competition has its own such agency—America’s is USADA, which I serve—and they all operate under the umbrella of the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA is the ultimate authority, responsible for ensuring that national agencies enforce the rules. Yet shortly before the 2021 Games got under way, CHINADA vacated the 23 violations, giving a cock-and-bull story about accidental contamination in the kitchen where the athletes’ meals were prepared. And WADA simply accepted CHINADA’s obviously suspect ruling.

WADA failed even to publish its decision. The world was alerted only last month by whistleblowers who pushed evidence of the scandal to the media. Prompted by the revelations to respond, WADA issued a statement citing its prior conclusion “that it was not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source of TMZ” and “that, given the specific circumstances of the asserted contamination, the athletes would be held to have no fault or negligence.”

WADA’s failure of oversight and lack of transparency are corroding fair competition—and that has come to haunt clean athletes around the world. If WADA had properly upheld its mission, China would likely have lost 13 of its top swimmers chosen for the Olympic team at Tokyo. Instead, China won six medals, three of them gold, in the pool.

USADA has the job of ensuring that American swimmers abide by the rules and compete clean; as a result of WADA’s inaction, several of them potentially lost podium places in Tokyo that they deserved. Worse, the world body’s enforcement failures have made national anti-doping agencies such as CHINADA hostage to bad regimes, turning the agencies and the athletes they oversee into pawns in a cynical geopolitical game of prestige and power.

What we are seeing is a reinvention of the bad old days of the Cold War, when East Germany tried fraudulently to demonstrate the superiority of state socialism by systematically doping its athletes. Back then, no international anti-doping movement existed, and East Germany’s cheating went suspected but largely undetected until years later. By then, it was too late for justice; the harms done—both to the athletes’ health and to the credibility of the competition in that era—were permanent. Today, we have the World Anti-Doping Agency to police international sports—but enforcement works only if the watchdog itself is unbiased, conflict-free, and effective. At the Paris Games this summer, clean competition is very much in doubt.

[Read: The Olympics have always been political]

In 2008, I attended the Beijing Olympics as a member of WADA’s independent-observer team. As the newly appointed head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, I was thrilled to be the WADA team’s vice chair and legal expert, and eager to play my part in upholding the integrity of sports. No doubt I was naive, but ever since that experience, a One World, One Dream framed picture from the Beijing Games has hung on my office wall.

Back then, my high hopes for doping-free sports did not seem so naive. During Jacques Rogge’s tenure as the president of the International Olympic Committee, WADA was at the peak of its prowess in making the Olympics free from cheating. As a medical doctor, Rogge understood the value of keeping sports both fair and healthy for the athletes taking part—with results and records that the public could believe in. And he found willing partners in WADA’s leaders at the time, David Howman and John Fahey, who were determined to keep the anti-doping fight independent of politics.

Sadly, that has changed. These days, I find I very much need that reminder on my wall of the Games’ sporting ideals. Those ideals look tarnished now: The Olympic movement is rife with examples of sports hijacked for national and political purposes. And the very agency charged with safeguarding clean competition, WADA, is implicated in the political theater.

The scandal involving China is only the latest instance of WADA’s failure to uphold its mission. The erosion of its integrity and authority dates back to 2015, when Russia’s manipulations leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were exposed. Those Games were tainted by a state-sponsored doping program that involved Moscow’s apparatchiks interfering with the testing protocols to make adverse tests of its own doped athletes conveniently disappear from the system. It became obvious that sports were being recruited as a tool of realpolitik when Russia’s foreign minister complained about USADA’s “provocative anti-Russian demands” to then–Secretary of State John Kerry, who upheld my agency’s position that Russia had to comply with the WADA rules.

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The evidence of Russian cheating was irrefutable. My colleagues and I met with the whistleblowers, including the former director of Russia’s testing laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who had fled the country and sought asylum in America. USADA echoed the calls from several athlete groups—including WADA’s own Athletes Committee, led by the Olympian Beckie Scott, and the IOC’s equivalent committee under the leadership of another Olympian, Claudia Bokel—not to close the Russia investigation but to expand it. Yet WADA, in a now-familiar pattern, refused to listen and declined to pursue the matter.

Despite my personal plea to the agency’s director general in March 2016, WADA remained unmoved by the cries of clean athletes. To be clear, these athletes make enormous sacrifices and undergo years of hard training to participate in Olympic competition. But when anti-doping agencies fail, and even abet cheats, they make a mockery of the Olympic movement. The clean athletes’ dreams are shattered by the greed and deception of those entrusted with safeguarding the purity of the Games.

In the Sochi case, WADA’s intransigence proved shortsighted. Just weeks after my appeal to WADA, in May 2016, 60 Minutes and The New York Times broke the story—and forced the agency’s hand, compelling action. Congress held hearings about WADA’s failures, as it was entitled to do because American taxpayer dollars support the international anti-doping infrastructure. In fact, ironically enough, WADA succeeded in leveraging its own dereliction into an argument for more funding.

The agency made a pitch to its international backers that it needed new investigative powers, more personnel, and a 60 percent increase in its budget from 2018 through 2025. It got what it asked for, but the U.S. government also did its best to make WADA accountable. It insisted on a governing seat on the agency’s board, and made U.S. funding of WADA no longer mandatory but discretionary.

[Read: A list of Russia’s responses to the doping scandal]

In principle, WADA’s job as global regulator is not complicated: All it has to do is apply the rules to the facts without fear or favor. But the pursuit of global power-politics in sports is a systemic problem that overrules any notion of fair play, and WADA failed to deploy its new tools effectively. When WADA received notice of the Chinese swimmers’ positives in 2021, it should have sanctioned CHINADA for its mishandling of the violations.

The postive-test findings occurred just months, in fact, before Beijing was to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. So had WADA applied the rules correctly, both China and the IOC itself would have faced grave embarrassment. Instead, WADA chose to give one country—a very powerful, rising country that had already been favored as host of the next Games—preferential treatment. Do we think for a second that WADA would have overlooked the burying of these tests if they had come from a small, poor country in Africa or South America instead of China?

In 2019 and 2020, WADA received almost $2 million from the Chinese government above that country’s required dues to the agency. Then, in early 2023, WADA signed an undisclosed sponsorship agreement with the largest sporting-goods manufacturer in China, Anta—a company that also has a sponsorship deal with the Chinese Swimming Federation. Although no evidence of a quid pro quo has emerged, extra payments and confidential sponsorship arrangements—coinciding with the special treatment of doping violations—create a damaging appearance of conflicted interests for WADA.

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The influence of money and politics within WADA erodes its credibility, casting doubt on its impartiality and independence. As nations vie for supremacy on the global stage, the risk is that sports success becomes—as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said of war—“a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.” Russia and China are, unsurprisingly, the most conspicuous offenders, with the resources and capacity to bend the system to their will. But if they are allowed to have their way, other bad actors will imitate their example.

Ultimately, WADA’s failures will damage the Olympic Games themselves. Who wants to watch unfair races or rigged events? The commercial machine that powers the Games—namely, the Olympic broadcaster, NBC, and multimillion-dollar sponsors such as Visa, Airbnb, and Coca-Cola—should be alarmed: The value of their investment sinks along with the competition’s integrity. The Olympics’ media and sponsorship partners ought to be acting as a powerful countervailing force on WADA to do its job properly and protect their interests.

The very future of the Olympics—together with its ethos of amity, respect, and fair competition—is at stake. How many medals will be stolen from clean competitors by doped athletes—even under the noses of Western and other democratic leaders at this summer’s Games in Paris—before those who purport to back the Olympic movement take decisive action? If the Olympics are to be more than an arena for great-power games, world leaders need to act and resume their responsibility to back the world anti-doping effort. The soul of fair sports depends upon it.